Thursday, December 8, 2016

Born in Illinois in 1868, it is Mary Austin’s understanding
of how people are affected by their environment that endures. As she writes in The
Land of Journeys’ Ending [published 1924], “[Man] is all that he sees; all
that flows to him from a thousand sources, half noted, or noted not at all
except by some sense that lies too deep for naming. He is the land, the lift of
its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys; his is the rhythm of its seasonal
processions, the involution and variation of its vegetal patterns. If there is
in the country of his abiding, no more than a single refluent color, such as
the veiled green of sage-brush or the splendid wine of sunset spilled along the
Sangre de Cristo, he takes it in and gives it forth again in directions and
occasions least suspected by himself, as a manner, as music, as a prevailing
tone of thought.”

Mary’s beloved father died when she was ten. Her mother,
left with three living children, set to work, giving Mary the housework and the
care of her little brother. Mary studied science, especially botany, at a small
Presbyterian college, graduating at 20. She was intense and awkward, and felt
unloved by her mother. Nevertheless, she joined the family when they moved to
the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley near Bakersfield, filing homestead
claims.

The farming venture failed due to drought, but the stark
environment and the presence of the Paiute Indians fueled a perception that
guided Mary throughout life. She wrote of herself in Earth Horizon [published
1932] that she sat out in the dunes in the moonlight, apathetic by day: “Her
trouble was that the country failed to explain itself. If it had a history,
nobody could recount it. Its creatures had no known life except such as she
could discover by unremitting vigilance of observation; its plants no names
that her Middlewestern botany could supply. She did not know yet what were its
weather signs, nor what the procession of its days might bring forth. Until
these things elucidated themselves factually, Mary was spellbound in an effort
not to miss any animal behavior, any bird-marking, any weather signs, any
signature of tree or flower.”

Determined to become a writer, Mary married Wallace Austin,
who supported her in this. They moved to the Owens Valley, which Mary
celebrated in her most famous book, The Land of Little Rain [published
1903]. “If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be
in the loneliest land that ever came out of God’s hands, what they do there and
why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None other than
this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the
tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm.
They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to
go away without quite realizing that you have not done it.”

Wallace Austin’s irrigation schemes were a failure. He and
Mary also tried to prevent the attempts of Los Angeles to gain control of the
Owens River. Mary visited William Mulholland, who said after the interview, “By
God, that woman is the only one who has brains enough to see where this is
going.” The Austins had one child, Ruth, who was developmentally disabled. Mary
worked as a writer and teacher to support the family, eventually putting Ruth
in an institution after the success of The Land of Little Rain.

Mary began to move away from her family, meeting other
artists and writers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and living in Carmel,
California, during its time as an artists’ colony, between 1904 and 1911. She
spent three years in Europe, getting a reputation there as a writer from the
American West. When she returned, she lived in New York, but was finally called
back to the desert, to a home in Santa Fe, where she died in 1934.

Constantly writing for magazines and speaking until her
death, Mary Austin was a well-known figure during her time. Though resentment
and egocentrism sometimes mar her writing, much of it is straight observation
of natural surroundings. She also sought out people who inhabited the desert,
the Indians, miners and other outsiders with whom she felt kinship. Of an
Indian woman basket-maker: "But suppose you find Seyavi retired into the privacy of her blanket, you will get nothing for that day. There is no other privacy possible in a campoodie. All the processes of life are carried on out of doors or behind the thin, twig-woven walls of the wickiup, and laughter is the only corrective for behavior."

Mary Austin’s writing feeds my own desert longings. Of the
lure of the vast cactus garden between Tucson and Phoenix: “If I should
disappear from my accustomed places,” she says, “look for me beyond the last
spur of Santa Catalina, where there is a one-armed sahuaro having a hawk’s nest
in the crotch. Beyond that there is a plantation of thistle poppies on the tops
of whose dusty green stems have perched whole flocks of white, wind-ruffled
doves.”

About Me

Review Copies

For the favor of a review on Amazon, Goodreads or a circulating magazine, review copies of books by Connie Kronlokken are now available. Please send your request plus name and address to lightlyheldbooks@gmail.com.